Helping others

Do you remember my CD-ROM saga? When I completed messed up my
system? You can read the original article here. In
that article, I changed the nick of the person to xyz, to protect the guilty. In
that article, which includes my logs of what went on in on IRC in #freebsd on EFnet IRC Network, you
can see how I made some silly errors. More importantly, you can see how people
helped me fix the problem. A short 15 minutes of help made all the difference.

Each
of us can contribute in different ways. I write websites (the Diary, FreshPorts, unix @ home,
NZFUG, to name a few). I help out via IRC
on Undernet #FreeBSD. Sometimes I answer questions on -questions. I submit PRs
when I know how to fix something (which isn’t very often).

I’ve already written about the various methods by which
people can show their support for FreeBSD. There is always something which *anyone*
can do. You don’t have to be a coder to contribute to the FreeBSD Project.

Exposed

When that article was first printed, I changed the nickname from jkh to
xyz. That was and still is my standard procedure. Some time later, when jkh
turned up on Undernet #FreeBSD one day, I recognized the nick from EFNET. It wasn’t
until some time later that someone told me jkh was Jordan Hubbard. I always thought it was
Jordan who had given me that early help. But I didn’t have any proof.

Until today.
I was talking in an unnamed Undernet channel, and I happened to mention that CD-ROM
article. Will Andrews pointed me off to the archives for the EFNET #FreeBSD
channel. He had found the original discussion. Here is an extract from the
that log: cdrom.txt (15 KB). The original log is at this URL (530 KB).

Why do I bother to mention this?

I don’t know. I guess it’s a combination of bragging that jkh helped me out in my
early days and a sense of wanting to encourage people to help others.

I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again: The FreeBSD Diary would not exist if
someone had not helped me out. I would have gotten stuck and given up. I would
have said something like:

Neah, I tried FreeBSD, but it was too hard.

I couldn’t figure it out.

It wouldn’t install.

It wouldn’t boot.

Remember how easy it is to help and then remember how hard it was when you were first
starting out.